Land-cover information is needed to select subbasins within the New River basin, Tennessee, for the study of hydrologic processes and also is needed to transfer study results to other sites affected by coal mining. It was believed that data recorded by the first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (Landsat-1) could be processed to yield the needed land-cover information. This study demonstrates that digital computer processing of the spectral information contained in each picture element (pixel) of 1.1 acres (4,500 m2) can produce maps and tables of the areal extent of selected land-cover categories.
The distribution of water, rock, agricultural areas, evergreens, bare earth, hardwoods, and uncategorized areas, is portrayed on a map of the entire New River basin (1:62,500 scale) and on 15 quadrangles (1:24,000 scale). Although some categories are a mixture of land-cover types, they portray the predominant component named. Tables quantify the area of each category and indicate that agriculture covers 5 percent of the basin, evergreens cover 7 percent, bare earth covers 6 percent, three categories of hardwoods cover 81 percent, and water, rock, and uncategorized areas each cover less than 1 percent of the basin.
